Keep an eye out for life-changing words

When was the last time you came across a word that changed your perception of the world? I’m not talking about words you swipe out of the medical, scientific or anachronism bin to win at “Scrabble” or ones you employ only to beat your rivals when playing “Words With Friends” on the computer.

I’m talking about discovering a word that opened a door, showed you a new color or helped you understand that an emotion, experience or idea you thought was yours alone is, instead, shared by so many other people that it has its very own name.

My first life-changing word- experience happened when my seventh-grade English teacher, a woman for whom I had great respect and affection, realized that I had a desperate crush on a boy in my class.

I wasn’t wearing my heart on my sleeve so much as I was wearing it as a clown suit. Every inch of my inner-life was out there in primary colors; my sensibilities have always been less than subtle.

When the boy started holding hands with a cuter, calmer, less raucous girl, making it clear that he spurned my advances and went as far in the other direction as possible while still choosing a female human being, my sympathetic teacher asked if I’d like to remain after class and talk.

My own mother, already ill with the disease that would soon take her life, wasn’t available for such superficial conversations. But Ms. Fitz was a steadying influence and helped me tidy up my messy early adolescence.

She taught me about resilience, giving me both the word and a sense of why it would be significant in my life.

Toward the end of spring, when I heard that my erstwhile beloved had been dumped, quite unceremoniously, by the quiet girl, I stopped by to let my teacher know.

“How does that make you feel?” she asked. I could tell she was making a real effort not to smile because I was doing the same thing. We were both being terribly adult.

“I’m sorry for him.” I tried as hard as I could to mimic Dr. Joyce Brothers, who was then considered to be the font of all relationship wisdom.

“Aren’t you maybe just a little happy, Gina?”

I couldn’t help it: I started to laugh and then she was laughing. I admitted that what I really wanted to do was dance around the room in tap shoes.

“There’s a word for that feeling,” Ms. Fitz explained. “It’s a German term: ‘schadenfreude.’ When you feel glee at somebody else’s humiliation, unhappiness or failure, schadenfreude is what you’re feeling. It’s perfectly natural.”

Why, this was fabulous! I wasn’t an inhuman and depraved barbarian. Other people felt this way, too. So what if they were European? I wasn’t the only person in the world to indulge in this nasty, yet delicious, sense of exultation.

You also have to use words correctly once you grab hold of them. Words are weapons as well as tools, and if you misuse them, you can hurt somebody or damage yourself.

For example, I make sure all my students know that “penultimate” means “second-to-last.”

Thirty years of Barreca students know the word “penultimate” because a friend of mine once brought a date to a dinner party who used the word but didn’t know what it meant. “This is a penultimate view!” she chirped. “This soup is simply penultimate!” she gushed.

“Is this is your final, or at least penultimate date, with this person?” I asked my friend. He assured me it was.

My students don’t make that mistake. And they also know if they feel a wicked flicker of schadenfreude when hearing that story, it’s normal.

Once you have a name for something, you can organize your life. You can grasp it more fully. Remember the scene from “The Miracle Worker” where Helen Keller learns the word for “water”?

That happens often, if not quite as dramatically, when we fold new words into our lives. They alter the texture of our understanding, making it more complex and intriguing.

Gina Barreca is an English professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of “If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?” and eight other books. She can be reached at www.ginabarreca.com